Brand Library & Art Center is proud to present two solo exhibitions:
In the Skylight Gallery:
Joshua Hagler – The River Lethe
In the Atrium Gallery:
Elizabeth Dorbad – Itinerant Architectures.
Since 2006, Joshua Hagler’s work has responded to religious fundamentalism in America, the history of Westward Expansion, notions of progress and exploration, mythology, and the poetics of theoretical physics. This current body of work draws inspiration from Lethe, the Greek mythological river of forgetting. It was said that one drinks from Lethe before being reborn, losing most or all memory of the past. German philosopher, Heidegger interpreted Lethe not as a simple accident of forgetting, but as a “concealment of being.” The task for Heidegger was “unconcealment,” in turn Hagler sets to uncover personal truths by examining America’s cultural amnesia and psychological repression.
The works comprising The River Lethe were made over a two-year period beginning in Los Angeles and ending at the Roswell Artist in Residence Program in New Mexico.
Elizabeth Dorbad’s on-going, global series Itinerant Architectures makes use of mobile home trailers as subject matter, material and symbol. The nomadic structures are of course found throughout the world, but in the woods and junkyards of California the use of these vehicles as buildings takes on particular associations evoking thoughts of frontierism, Western expansion, and civilization on the fringe of wilderness. The site-specific works, architectural interventions and sculpture rendered from architectural refuse point away from the built world and back toward the wilderness: iconic, heroic and untamed.
Initiated in 2012, Itinerant Architectures has had iterations in Memphis, Baltimore, San Francisco, Oakland, Badger, Berlin, Kassel, New York and Los Angeles.
Opening Reception: June 30th. On view through August 24th, 2018
